One of the horror genre's "most widely read critics" (Rue Morgue # 68), "an accomplished film journalist" (Comic Buyer's Guide #1535), and the award-winning author of Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002), John Kenneth Muir, presents his blog on film, television and nostalgia, named one of the Top 100 Film Studies Blog on the Net.

Thursday, May 18, 2017

Alien Week: AVP: Requiem (2007)

Long ago -- and according
to legend -- the great Sigourney Weaver put down the Ripley role because 20th
Century Fox envisioned a new direction for the Alien series.

What was that new direction?

Aliens vs. Predators.

Perhaps apocryphally,
perhaps truthfully, Weaver noted that she believed aliens belonged in the
darkest, most isolated corners of deep space, not jumping out from behind
haystacks on Earth.

Aliens vs. Predator
Requiem (2007) is the movie she
had the foresight to imagine.

It’s the aliens-jumping-out-of-haystacks
film.

And it is no
exaggeration to note that Requiem is godawful. It represents
franchise-scuttling at a heretofore unimaginable, apocalyptic level.

To put it another way, this
is the worst-shot major film that I’ve reviewed in ten years of blogging, and
the most disappointing too.

Often, I write here that
a horror film fails because it lacks suspense or tension. AVPR can’t even reach the quality threshold
where that’s a legitimate issue. The movie is incompetently lit, making important
details impossible to determine, and the narrative is incoherent and
contradictory.

The film never bothers
to build towards anything significant, and scenes start and stop without rhyme
or reason.

“You know, when I was
your age, I used to have these awful nightmares.”

AVPR is the tale of several aliens and one predator set
loose in a small Colorado town in the early twenty-first century.

Basically, the Pred-Alien
that hatched at the end of AVP (2004) causes a ruckus on a predator
ship in orbit and it crashes in Colorado. A bunch of face-huggers get loose in
the woods, thus spawning more aliens, and the Predators send one of their own
(from their home planet...) to clean up the mess.

Caught in the middle of
this war are a bunch of horny teenagers, a former juvenile delinquent named
Dallas (get it?) and sexy, confident Reiko Aylesworth as a tough-as-nails Iraq
War vet.

They all attempt to
escape the sleepy burg of Gunnison, while the U.S. Government puts a fatal
strategy into effect, one that will contain the spread of the alien forces.

“This plan is stupid.”

The most trenchant observation I can make regarding AVPR is
that it represents the first film in either classic horror franchise that feels
it necessary to spotlight teenagers skinny-dipping in a high school pool after
hours.

And yep, these horny
teens are attacked by swimming aliens there.

Once upon a time, neither franchise required stripping high-schoolers to draw enthusiastic
audiences.

Once upon a time, both
franchises were intelligent, beautifully-designed meditations on the darker
angels of human nature. But now -- all
the sudden -- we’re asked to sympathize with the angst and ennui of a pizza
delivery boy who wants to date a girl he’s always liked.

Because that’s the reason I go to see
Alien and Predator films.

As I wrote in my post
the other day, Alien 3 (1992) was about the
fact that survival isn't always a "win." One could also gaze at Aliens (1986) as a
metaphor for American arrogance during the Vietnam War. And the original Alien (1979)
was about, in some subconscious sense, human sexuality co-opted by a nasty
xenomorph.

Even 1997's Alien
Resurrection -- for all of its problems -- offered some worthwhile
commentary on the morality of human cloning, and the way that man had unwittingly
become more like the xenomorphs by corrupting the life-cycle of other beings.

But the best that AVPR can muster is to steal a page
from the 1980s slasher film formula: vice (sex) precedes slice-and-dice or in
this case, attack by alien.

I find this element of
the movie immensely depressing; that the Rolls Royce and Cadillac of horror
franchises settle for Friday the 13th-style scenarios that
are so hackneyed they were being mocked by Scream nearly
twenty years ago.

Now don’t get me wrong,
please. I happen to like many of the Friday the 13th films. The “Dead
teenager” formula absolutely has a purpose and a kind of validity to it in
appropriate circumstances. But I
hate to see Alien lobotomized into the equivalent of a bad
slasher flick. Especially one that so
readily dispenses with series continuity.

On that front, consider
the modifications presented by the Pred-Alien. It has developed,
genetically-speaking to eschew the egg and face-hugger stages of development. Now
it simply kisses its prey and pumps embryos into the throat, leading right to
the chest-burster stage.

I see this unnecessary
alteration as emblematic of the film’s lack of patience. AVPR isn’t willing to
take its time, make its characters sympathetic, or generate real feelings of
terror and unease. Instead, it just
wants to barrel away, skipping the things that would have made the film more
than an extended wrestling match. The
Pred-Alien’s evolution is a symbol of this lack of patience.

AVPR never bothers to explain how an infusion of Predator DNA permits
this change in the alien’s nature. Since
the answer is never given, I suspect
that the filmmakers decided to do something “cool” rather than something
faithful or dramatically motivated.
Here, we get a scene where a few chest-bursters erupt out of a pregnant
woman in labor, and that, I suppose, fulfills “the cool factor.”

Another question: why
does Predator technology -- and even the spaceship interior – suddenly look completely
different than how it looked at the end of Alien vs. Predator?

AVPR also puts the final nail in the long-erosion of the
"un-killable alien" meme first realized by Ridley Scott in 1979. In
his original film, the alien couldn't be killed, and couldn't even be stopped.
You just had to get away from it...to leave it behind floating in space.

Twenty-first century
weaponry is more than efficacious blowing up these once unstoppable beasts. The
trademark xenomorph -- once a genuine Terror from the Id -- is now just a big
"bug" to be swatted with our state-of-the-art hardware. Forget the
fact that it took advanced, futuristic hardware like smart guns and pulse
rifles in Aliens to do the same job.

Nope, now we can do it
with good old-fashioned, conventional shotguns and pistols.

Among other problems,
this fact dishonors Ripley’s four-movie journey. She fought the alien without
weapons. She fought the alien with weapons too.
She even laid down her life to prevent the aliens from reaching Earth,
and impacting innocent families.

Why?

The xenomorphs were so
dangerous that they could destroy everything, imperil all life. They were
a perfect (and perfectly hostile) life-form, and if they reached our cities…it
was game over.

Well, AVPR
undercuts Ripley’s meaningful sacrifice by putting aliens on Earth -- and making
them containable -- before Ripley was even born. This “sequel” film fails egregiously because it
rewrites the saga in a way that makes Ripley’s choice to die rather than birth
a queen seem inconsequential.

If aliens can be put
down by shot-guns, what’s the big deal?

Also, I strongly dislike
how the aliens move in this film. They are almost universally seen on
all-fours, as though they are banana-headed dogs, rather than the upright
drones of the earlier films.

The Predator fares slightly
better in the film, though he operates by no sense of logic I can discern. This
Predator arrives on Earth with the mission to "clean up" the mess. We
periodically see him spilling some kind of glowing blue acid stuff on the
corpses so as to cover the tracks of both the aliens and his own kind.

It's his mission, we presume
-- from this act of destroying the evidence -- to hide the incursion of
extra-terrestrials on Earth.

Given this task, the
fact that the predator skins a police
deputy and hangs his corpse from a tree --- to be found by the sheriff --
doesn't make a lot of sense. Why go out of your way to destroy all evidence of
your presence, and then leave behind a bloody, hanging corpse in a tree?

That's just one incredible gap in situational logic, but there are bigger fish
to fry here.

Before seeing the movie,
for instance, I read a number of reviews from unhappy fans indicating that the
film was poorly shot: that it was too dark.

I thought this was just
fan griping.

It isn't.

I know of no modern-day
corollaries for this overt failure in a major, big-budget production. But for
some reason, AVPR is terribly, terribly under-lit
throughout. Even the daylight scenes are hard to see. You'll spend the entire
movie squinting, trying to make-out the crappy action. This is a movie that actually hurts to
watch.

I mean that it physically hurts your eyes to
pay attention.

In scene after scene,
dark, indistinguishable figures clash with other dark, indistinguishable figures,
all to the sound of squealing, gunfire and grunting. Rain falls, and we get the
illumination we desire and need from brief instances of gunpowder flare and
lightning strikes.

But otherwise, we’re in
the dark, literally.

Even now, some years
later, I remain shocked that there was no quality control on the set in terms
of the lighting; no review of dailies that revealed the film was too dark to
countenance. Perhaps the film was darkened post-production because the monster
suits weren’t up to scrutiny? I don’t know the reason for the problem, but the
film is inarguably a visual disaster.

In the final analysis, AVPR isn't merely an insult to
the intelligence, it's an insult to the great tradition and lineage of Alien and
Predator
films.

A requiem, by the way, is a hymn for the dead; a musical composition for the
expired.

In this case, the
"requiem" sung by AVPR is the death knell of
not one, but two classic sci-fi film franchises.

3 comments:

John, I absolutely agree with your review of AVPR. What might have been an impressive film instead felt like just another bad monster horror film that the Aliens and Predators were placed in. I hate it too when a film under-lit !!!!! I hate it even more than J.J. Abrams lens flare obsession.

Yes, yes, agree all around. I went with friends to see this movie because we're all from Western Colorado, and after "Hey, look, it's supposed to be Gunnison!" there was absolutely no reason to watch. We kept waiting for a plot to develop, or for someone to replace that burned-out bulb, or for an honest-to-God slasher flick to emerge, or *something* of interest. What a piece of crap.

And along with you, SGB, I'm sick to death of under-lit and under-miked films! When you can't see what's going on (in some cases, that's a relief) or hear what's being said above all the ambient noise in a movie, you stop seeing movies. And Hollywood wonders where audiences have gone?

So much better than the first, but a still a failure. And this one really gets me as it's more of a Predator film than the previous. At least they got the Pred right this time (unlike those abominations in the first film). The Predalien is quite impressive in action as well. But the 1980s slasher film characters and the inability to see anything due to the non existent lighting kill it. How could they get it wrong, twice?

About John

award-winning author of 27 books including Horror Films FAQ (2013), Horror Films of the 1990s (2011), Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), TV Year (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007), Mercy in Her Eyes: The Films of Mira Nair (2006),, Best in Show: The Films of Christopher Guest and Company (2004), The Unseen Force: The Films of Sam Raimi (2004), An Askew View: The Films of Kevin Smith (2002), The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film & Television (2004), Exploring Space:1999 (1997), An Analytical Guide to TV's Battlestar Galactica (1998), Terror Television (2001), Space:1999 - The Forsaken (2003) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002).

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